The iTunes Classic Visualizer is great. For starters, it keeps you interested, and it seems uncannily good at matching the mood of the visuals to the style of music. The new Visualizer style just doesn’t make sense to me — pulsating orbs? Anyway, the problem with the Classic Visualizer is that it would always force a low resolution on you when using full screen mode. I’m happy to point out that the Classic Visualizer in iTunes... 

iTunes 10 provides a different layout for the Close, Minimize and Maximize buttons. Instead of being ordered horizontally, in iTunes 10 they’re arranged vertically, like a traffic light. Reverting the buttons to a horizontal layout can easily be done. With iTunes not running, open Terminal and enter the following code: defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1 To restore the vertical layout, simply use this command: defaults write com.apple.  Read More →

Since iTunes does not give you a lot of information via print or export of your apps, I wrote a little shell script to retrieve information from the app files themselves. The script creates and opens a .csv file. To correctly display the columns, choose ’semicolons’ as the column delimiter in your csv viewer (e.g. OpenOffice Calc). You can choose what information to retrieve by commenting/uncommenting them in the Attributes definition... 

Whenever I go to a website that asks for my location I wonder what exactly I am giving out. I found a neat Safari 5 extension from Upper Atmosphere called FindMe . FindMe displays your location in a tool bar. Your location is just a button press away. You can also click on the result to display it on a map. Interestingly, Mac OS X Location Services are only available if you have a  Read More →

This hint is an update to this rather old hint which explains how to record HDTV signals from a FireWire capable box. For the most part, everything is the same as in the original guide, however there are a few differences. First, with the rise of FireWire 800, you should note that cable boxes supplied by your provider will have FireWire 400, so if you only have FW800 cables, you’ll need to get a 400-800 cable or adaptor. Second, Apple’s... 

Apple made it quite easy and intuitive to quit out of apps in iOS 4; however I have not seen this method mentioned anywhere. Double tap the Home button to bring up the multitasking applications view, then tap and hold on an app (as if you were arranging your home screen). A small red circle will appear on each app; tap one to close that app. And, of course, you can still swipe through the list to see more. [ crarko adds: I can't test this one on... 

There are some obsolete plugins that can give Safari 5 a lot of grief, and there are some reports on the Apple forums of a problematic plugin called FastBrowserSearch. It’s apparently not new but I didn’t see it posted here so thought I’d submit it. It’s not hard to uninstall but it’s a little tricky where it’s placed. If you open Safari and …  Read More →

I had moved all my /Applications to /Volumes/apps/Applications, and VMware Fusion 3 would not start. What VMware Fusion is looking for is to use the shell command “cd” ../Library to look for its files. So I sym linked /Library to /Volumes/apps/Library , and it started right up. The Terminal command used to do that was: $ sudo ln -s /Library /Volumes/apps/Library If you have a separate …  Read More →

I dislike the Windows-like arrows in the lower left corner of alias icons. Ever since Panther came out, I’d been using the technique described in this hint to get rid of them. After updating to 10.5.8 the pesky arrows were back, I had a little trouble locating the tip for 10.5, because it is categorized for 10.3, and updated information for Tiger users is only presented at the end of the comments. This method works for Leopard [ crarko adds:... 

Services are all the rage in 10.6 now. Since Apple let non-developer users make their own Services in Automator, people (like me) have been suggesting many services. This hint is how to make a shortened URL using a lesser-known service named qgf.in. You can use other services too, as long as they have an API (usually the syntax is ‘http://shortener.name/api?url=http://foo.bar’). Credits to all the people in the MacOSXHints Forums who... 

The QuoteFix plugin for Mail.app formats your email reply for bottom posting. It puts the original message on top of your reply and sets the cursor between the original message and your signature. Mail’s default action in to place the reply text at the top of the message. QuoteFix can be downloaded from here . Following the description from the developer’s site: QuoteFix is a plug-in for Mail.app which fixes some issues with replying... 

I’ve been noticing for weeks now that several of my repeating appointments are showing up at the wrong time on my iPhone’s Calendar application, even though the right time shows up in iCal on my desktop. The appointments are showing up on the right day, but many hours earlier, e.g. 4:00 AM. In iCal on my Mac, I opened one of…  Read More →

I was changing some preferences in iMovie ‘09 when I noticed there’s a cool font in the last tab – Coolvetica. I was sure I don’t have it installed on my system, so I dug in the application itself and there it was, together with some other nice fonts, like Duality or Strenuous, which I might use later for some titling in FCP – that’s what those fonts were used for. Right-or control-click the iMovie icon in Applications... 

This might already be well-known but I’ve never spotted it before. If you right-click a Stickies note, there’s an option for Capture Selection from Screen. This effectively brings-up the screengrab tool and you can click and drag to not only capture part of the screen, but also automatically insert it into the note. If you use Stickies for research and note-making purposes, like I do, this is a superb and fuss-free way to grab a photograph... 

In Mac OS X, there’s a cool feature that let you search in Google from the contextual menu in a lot of apps (Mail, TextEdit, iCal…) but this features uses Safari instead of your default browser (Firefox in my case). I wanted to be able to do the same with my default browser; read on to see how this was accomplished using OnMyCommand. OnMyCommand is a program that executes shell scripts and AppleScripts. You can build your own Contextual...